Swiping and holding will make the home button act like a scroll bar, and you can rapidly flip through Recent Apps thumbnails. Swiping to the right on the home button will open Recent Apps and launch the previous app. Swiping up the screen halfway twice will open Recent Apps on the first swipe and the app drawer on the second swipe. Swiping halfway up the screen will open Recent Apps, and swiping all the way up the screen will open the app drawer. ![]() Tapping on the button will, as usual, go Home, while long-pressing will open the Google Assistant. Turn on gesture controls, and the Recent Apps buttons will disappear, back will occasionally disappear, and you'll get an elongated home button. By default, Android P has the normal system UI bar, but if you go to settings ⇒ system ⇒ gestures ⇒ "swipe up from home button," you can enable the new gesture system. Internally, the new gesture buttons and new Recent Apps interface are referred to as "Quick Step." Remember, this is a developer preview, so things are not finished, and sure enough the current state of gesture controls needs a lot of work. The home screen looks great, with a simple one-button layout, but everywhere else you see the ugly, lopsided back button. If everything in Google Material has rounded corners, and the display has rounded corners, shouldn't the recent app thumbnails have rounded corners? Gesture controls are a hot mess Google came clean about its new design language at Google I/O, called the "Google Material Theme," but it doesn't seem like it was applied to this screen. I doubt it could be changed through a third-party launcher (it probably needs system-level permissions), but it is a bit more flexible. Recent Apps living in the Pixel launcher app means the interface could now be updated through the Play Store. Before, the Pixel launcher was only a small stub application that enabled the Google apps' launcher functionality, but now the Pixel launcher is actually gaining functional code. Keep in mind, most of the launcher code isn't in the Pixel launcher but is instead in the Google App. The code for Recent Apps now lives in the Pixel Launcher on DP2. One interesting part of the new Recent Apps is that it is no longer part of the system UI. Long-pressing on the input box in Gmail actually selects the placeholder label text (things like "Subject" and "to" in Gmail), and there is never an option to "paste." It's a developer's preview, and things are broken. I hope the plan is to make it super easy to copy and paste text from one thumbnail to another, but right now pasting into an input box doesn't really work. You can long-press on any text to bring up the usual text selection controls, and you can also long-press on a picture in Google Photos and copy it. Not only can you read the thumbnails, though, you can also interact with them. If you want to quickly reference something, the bigger, high-quality thumbnails are nice. The larger thumbnails bring the added bonus of being able to easily read text in a thumbnail. In P, they don't have any title bars at all and instead have an icon overlaid on the top edge. Thumbnails used to get a title bar with an app icon in Android O. Thumbnails are a lot bigger, and below the horizontal row of thumbnails is a search bar and a row of suggested app icons. You now have to tap on an icon and pick "split screen."Īndroid P brings big changes to Recent Apps, which scrolls horizontally now instead of vertically. Split screen doesn't work via long-pressing on the Recent Apps button or via dragging app thumbnails to the side of the screen.
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